WATSONVILLE >> Baby Sergio’s fever was spiking. His parents had just arrived here from Mexico with no papers, no money, no family, no friends.

The parents tried bringing down the fever, but it didn’t work. The baby started convulsing. An ambulance whisked the terrified young family to a hospital. There, a social worker met with them.
“Don’t worry, señora,” the social worker told Maria as she signed Sergio up for a program called Healthy Kids. She handed the anxious mother an insurance card.
Maria believes that little card saved her son’s life repeatedly over the next several years, allowing him to have regular checkups and paying for crucial surgeries and medical care.

“I am so thankful,” Maria said again and again through tears in a recent interview. “I feel so blessed by what they did for my son.” She requested that her family be identified only by first names because they are in the U.S. illegally.

Yes it was, history is very clear. We didn’t have an official border patrol until 1914. We didn’t pass any laws restricting immigration until the Page Act of 1875, the Chinese immigrants it concerned becoming the very first “illegal aliens”.

All Federal laws concerning itself with immigrants before then, from the 1870 law on back, dealt exclusively with naturalization. Not whether if immigrants could come here.

USCIS, the agency which manages our immigration today, describes 18th and 19th century immigration this way:

“***Americans encouraged relatively free and open immigration during the 18th and early 19th centuries, and rarely questioned that policy until the late 1800s. After certain states passed immigration laws following the Civil War, the Supreme Court in 1875 declared regulation of immigration a federal responsibility. Thus, as the number of immigrants rose in the 1880s and economic conditions in some areas worsened, Congress began to pass immigration legislation.***”

The “open borders” which were not really that open in “the good old days,” worked because you didn’t have the extensive welfare programs that attract immigrants today. It was very much of a sink or swim situation. If you worked and pulled your own weight, you could do well. If you came here thinking that “the streets were paved with gold,” that you could sit on your tail and have the world provide you with a living, you didn’t.

It was not easy for immigrants, but there was one key word, opportunity. If you born in Europe in lower class circumstances, your chances of rising above that were very slim. If you born poor, you stayed poor. There wasn’t much most people could do about it because the European system kept people down. Like the liberals of today, the royalty and the people who were connected to them, controlled you fate.

America was different. You could come here like the Kenneys as poor Irish immigrates, and within a couple of generations land on top of the heap. That’s still possible today, but it’s getting harder and harder as government grows takes more and more out of the private sector. The liberals want control just like kings, emperors and dictators. They talk a good game about being for “the little people” but what they real want is for the little people to give them power. Once they get that power, they will use it more to sustain their position more than anything else.

Hillary Clinton now has a net worth of over $100 million. She got most of it by taking bribes from large corporations and foreign countries. She wants more. I don’t know why she needs it, but she thinks she does. If you look at her campaign, there is nothing uplifting about it. It’s just tax and spend, expand government, and if you read between the lines, pay off those who pay her.

The Democrats support open borders because they perceive that they will turn a very large percentage of immigrants into “blank check” Democratic voters, just like the African-Amerian voting block. That’s really what the whole immigration issue is all about.

Our country was created with open borders.** Barry Goldwater, though not thinking we could have it right away, wanted us to work towards having an open border.**

Sorry, but trade-first ideas as to immigration policy is clearly within Conservative genology. Trying to write it off as “leftist” is just ahistorical rhetoric.

If anything, your mercantile ideas about workers are what is leftist. You echo the Labor Unions from the 1970s, and you likely don’t even realize it.

I am not sure that was his thinking, I believe he more predicted we would have open borders:

"In 1962, Barry Goldwater jotted down some thoughts on where his beloved Arizona would be in 50 years. On immigration and Mexico, he said:

Our ties with Mexico will be much more firmly established in 2012 because, sometime within the next 50 years, the Mexican border will become as the Canadian border, a free one, with the formalities and red tape of ingress and egress cut to a minimum so that the residents of both countries can travel back and forth across the line as if it were not there."

My dad was good friends with him and had known him for a very long time and they often talked politics and while I was not in on every conservation I don’t remember of the borders ever being a hot topic among them. I interviewed him for a paper I wrote in school and it was never mentioned by him.

So I lean toward his thinking was more of a prediction rather than a plank in his platform…

I am not sure that was his thinking, I believe he more predicted we would have open borders:

"In 1962, Barry Goldwater jotted down some thoughts on where his beloved Arizona would be in 50 years. On immigration and Mexico, he said:

Our ties with Mexico will be much more firmly established in 2012 because, sometime within the next 50 years, the Mexican border will become as the Canadian border, a free one, with the formalities and red tape of ingress and egress cut to a minimum so that the residents of both countries can travel back and forth across the line as if it were not there."

My dad was good friends with him and had known him for a very long time and they often talked politics and while I was not in on every conservation I don’t remember of the borders ever being a hot topic among them. I interviewed him for a paper I wrote in school and it was never mentioned by him.

So I lean toward his thinking was more of a prediction rather than a plank in his platform…

That was probably a very reasonable prophecy in 1962, because we had not yet implemented “The Great Society” in 1962; Socialism destroys the future of every good thing and removes the motivations that inspire people with good agendas to seek each other out and build great things.

The Welfare State has replaced the good motives with motives of sloth, theft and no concern for what is left behind for those who will come later; this is obvious when you consider that there are no respected Conservative voices who advocate for open borders AFTER the Welfare State had been implemented and reaped its entirely predictable consequences.

>
> WATSONVILLE >> Baby Sergio’s fever was spiking. His parents had just arrived here from Mexico with no papers, no money, no family, no friends.
>
> The parents tried bringing down the fever, but it didn’t work. The baby started convulsing. An ambulance whisked the terrified young family to a hospital. There, a social worker met with them.
> “Don’t worry, señora,” the social worker told Maria as she signed Sergio up for a program called Healthy Kids. She handed the anxious mother an insurance card.
> Maria believes that little card saved her son’s life repeatedly over the next several years, allowing him to have regular checkups and paying for crucial surgeries and medical care.
>
> ***“I am so thankful,” Maria said again and again through tears in a recent interview. “I feel so blessed by what they did for my son.” She requested that her family be identified only by first names because they are in the U.S. illegally.
> ***

Indeed! American citizens have been made into tax slaves to support the economic needs of millions of foreigners who have invaded our borders.

JWK

What did Hillary Clinton repeatedly tell the American people about a federal takeover of our nation’s healthcare system?*** CLICK HERE*** to hear Hillary Clinton lie to the American people.***

**Mr. BURKE *thought it of importance to fill the country with useful men, such as farmers, mechanics, and manufacturers, and, therefore, would hold out every encouragement to them to emigrate to America. This class he would receive on liberal terms; and he was satisfied there would be room enough for them, and for their posterity, for five hundred years to come. There was another class of men, whom he did not think useful, and he did not care what impediments were thrown in their way; such as your European merchants, and factors of merchants, who come with a view of remaining so long as will enable them to acquire a fortune, and then they will leave the country, and carry off all their property with them. These people injure us more than they do us good, and, except in this last sentiment, I can compare them to nothing but leeches. They stick to us until they get their fill of our best blood, and then they fall off and leave us. I look upon the privilege of an American citizen to be an honorable one, and it ought not to be thrown away upon such people. There is another class also that I would interdict, that is, the convicts and criminals which they pour out of British jails. I wish sincerely some mode could be adopted to prevent the importation of such; but that, perhaps, is not in our power; the introduction of them ought to be considered as a high misdemeanor. ***

So, as it turns out, allowing the kind of foreigners who are now invading our borders to stay here should be considered as a “high misdemeanor” which happens to be an impeachable offense!

Yes indeed, we had borders, and we didn’t police Immigration. Surprisingly, these two things were not in conflict, despite all the fan fair made about not policing = no border.

Before 1914, you didn’t need a passport, and we didn’t care about skills or family or how much money you had. Before 1875, we also didn’t care if you were Asian.

Before the appearance of the Know Nothings in the 1850s, there was no organized resistance to immigration in American politics. Only naturalization.

> Try your history again.

History is clear, you should go back and look at it.

What some of you were probably thinking was that laws like the **Alien & sedition act of 1798 ** affected immigration.

But it didn’t, it only affected naturalization (extending it out to 14 years). Up to about 1870, naturalization was the battlefield surrounding immigrants, whether they could become Americans, not whether they could be here.

The “open borders” which were not really that open in “the good old days,”

Oh, they were very open.

Again, no passport required, and no border patrol. Immigrants walked in from everywhere. Even during the Ellis Island era, immigrants didn’t stop crossing the border.

> worked because you didn’t have the extensive welfare programs that attract immigrants today.

The problem with that logic is that immigrants leave during economic downturns, and have been leaving California to go to Texas in droves.

People don’t do that if benefits are all they care about.

> America was different. You could come here like the Kenneys as poor Irish immigrates, and within a couple of generations land on top of the heap. That’s still possible today, but it’s getting harder and harder as government grows takes more and more out of the private sector. The liberals want control

Republicans have been advocating control too.

Their answer to government control of the businesses and welfare, is to give it more control of the border & population.

Answering a government created problem, with a government solution.

I say, end the cluster. Build a wall around the welfare state, deregulate industries, and let more people in. Stop the government in creating the problem; restore freedom.

> The Democrats support open borders

They actually don’t. That would get them in trouble with their union bosses, and their other pro-labor elements.

Rather, they support continuing something like the status quo, where the laws on the books are draconian, but they can bend them for people when & where they wish to. Make the immigrants owe them.

They don’t want to fix the immigration system anymore than they want to fix the schools or local economies for urban blacks. Both situations would make those people no longer dependent on them.

Sooner or later California is going to go bankrupt. As the leader in liberal policies, when that happens I’m going to celebrate.

Exactly,and the leadership won’t care because their true goal of an impossible to defeat Leftist majority that is too lazy to rise up and demand anything better will be the insurmountable majority; and there will always be enough tax receipts to keep those leaders living high.

In fact, one need only visit Mexico to get a glimpse of California’s future; except for a large influx of money from Washington as a thank you for all the Electoral College votes that the Left will get in perpetuity. I don’t know who has a more bleak destiny, those of us in California who are speeding toward 3rd world status or the other States who will be stuck subsidizing our idiocy.

If I were the president, I’d let California swirl down the fiscal toilet. Bankruptcy can be a good thing. The viable parts of an entity are taken over by others while the junk goes to the scrap heap. The people learn a valuable lesson from the pain - Don’t let this happen again.

The fact that the liberals in the state have taken a program meant to help Americans only to use it for those who are illegal is a tread that needs to be reversed.

When NON American citizens go to the head of the line your country is in a sad state of decay. The problem is there have been created hundreds if not thousands of programs that do this across the US that are both Fed and state funded. Nothing in either govt ever goes away, govt just keeps getting added to.

Yes. You should go back and look at our country’s history. At the time our existing Constitution was being framed, each state controlled and regulated immigration into is own state borders. And just for the record, this explicit power was never relinquished to the federal government. And the only exception to this original power of the states is found in Article 1 Section 9:* The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.*

JWK

***The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, respectively, or to the people.***___ Tenth Amendment